Since My Last Post in March

we bought a house, which involved some fixing up and moving from our temporary apartment

I returned to my day job part time

we spent 11 days in the hospital with Baby Bingo* after he had to have surgery on his lung

I’ve haven’t done any fiction writing since I had the baby, but I’ve been plotting several short stories and my next novel in my head. The writing drop-off also happened when Toddler was a baby. I didn’t resume writing until I was back at work full time and would use my lunch breaks for editing my novel. Perhaps there is something physiological that zaps creativity in the months following birth. Or it could just be the lack of sleep with a newborn.

What I have done a lot of is reading, during my many hours of breastfeeding each day. I have lots of new favorites books:

I was on an Edith Wharton kick this summer and re-read one of my all time favorites, House of Mirth, as well as Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton is perhaps my very favorite author, but after my run of those two books, plus Ethan Frome, Summer, and Custom of the Country, I had to take a break from Ms. Wharton in search of some books with happy endings!

About my Line-A-Day-Journal resolution progress: it’s not going well. As in, I have a five month stretch of perfectly blank entries this year. I just don’t understand why is it so hard for someone undaunted by writing a novel to write one line in a journal each day!

*Bingo is one of our baby’s nicknames, courtesy of Toddler who is now three years old